The article accurately describes the usual outcome of the Sex and the City lifestyle. Women who delay marriage and babies for careers and fun (and the perfect man) often end up alone.

Being alone is a crappy outcome for them. For the society, if this becomes common (as it is in the West) it is a disaster. The more intelligent and motivated women will not pass their higher quality genes on and the result is a lower quality group on the whole.

These eye-catching topics do not appear in supermarket-aisle gossip magazines. They are articles about single, professional women published on the Web site of China’s state feminist agency, the All-China Women’s Federation. The Communist Party founded the Women’s Federation in 1949 to “protect women’s rights and interests.”

In 2007, the Women’s Federation defined “leftover” women (sheng nu ) as unmarried women over the age of 27 and China’s Ministry of Education added the term to its official lexicon. Since then, the Women’s Federation Web site has run articles stigmatizing educated women who are still single.

Take this uplifting column from March 2011 that ran just after International Women’s Day:

Pretty girls don’t need a lot of education to marry into a rich and powerful family, but girls with an average or ugly appearance will find it difficult. These kinds of girls hope to further their education in order to increase their competitiveness. The tragedy is, they don’t realize that as women age, they are worth less and less, so by the time they get their M.A. or Ph.D., they are already old, like yellowed pearls.

After knocking some good sense into those misguided women who pursue a higher education, the column accuses educated, single women of sleeping around and having degenerate morals:

Many highly educated “leftover women” are very progressive in their thinking and enjoy going to nightclubs to search for a one-night stand, or they become the mistress of a high official or rich man. It is only when they have lost their youth and are kicked out by the man, that they decide to look for a life partner. Therefore, most “leftover women” do not deserve our sympathy.

Glad we got that straight. Now, why would China’s state feminist agency conduct a scare-mongering campaign against single, educated women?

Curious, I searched the Women’s Federation Web site and found that it posted its first article on “leftover” women in 2007, shortly after China’s State Council issued an edict on strengthening the Population and Family Planning program to address “unprecedented population pressures.” These pressures include the sex-ratio imbalance — which “causes a threat to social stability” — and the “low quality of the general population, which makes it hard to meet the requirements of fierce competition for national strength,” according to the State Council. The State Council names “upgrading population quality (suzhi)” as one of its key goals, and appoints the Women’s Federation as a primary implementer of its population planning policy.

What better way to upgrade population quality than to frighten “high-quality” women into marrying and having a child for the good of the nation?

The Women’s Federation columns on sheng nu all share the same goal: convince single, educated women to stop being so ambitious and get married already:

The main reason many girls become “leftover women” is that their standards for a partner are too high … As girls are not too picky, finding a partner should be as easy as blowing away a speck of dust.

Some of the columns have been reposted several times over the years and list helpful tips, such as “seduce but don’t pester” and “be persistent but not willful”:

When holding out for a man, if you say he must be rich and brilliant, romantic and hardworking ... this is just being willful. Does this kind of perfect man exist? Maybe he does exist, but why on earth would he want to marry you?

Since 2008, local population planning commissions in cities such as Nanjing and Ningbo have carried out “interventions” to address the “leftover women crisis.” Local Women’s Federation branches have arranged matchmaking events for “highly educated, high-quality” women. This March there was a drive in Pinghu, Zhejiang Province, for “leftover women to speedily find conjugal happiness.”

These ladies should just prepare to marry right after high school. They may have achieved economic "success" but man who wants some old bag like that? Yeah she has cash and that would be cool but along with it comes this attitude of "Well, I am an independent woman".
I'd be like "Shove it!"

But then again once they are a few years or so above 25 they are way too old for my taste so I don't even waste my time talking with them.

The only reason a chick should go to college/university is to get her MRS degree.

Last edited by Zackback on Sun Oct 14, 2012 3:13 pm; edited 2 times in total

You forgot the part about the rampant cheating some wives of powerful Chinese men must endure.

Quote:

And once a “leftover” woman finds marital bliss, what should she do if her husband has an affair?

The Women’s Federation comes to the rescue, with the headline, “Faced With A Marital Crisis, Women Need to Improve Themselves”:

When you find out that he is having an affair, you may be in a towering rage, but you must know that if you make a fuss, you are denying the man “face” ... No man is capable of spending a lifetime being loyal to an outmoded wife who never changes ... Try changing your hairstyle or your fashion. Women must constantly change for the better.

In short, it’s the woman’s fault for refusing to get married, and once she is married, it’s the woman’s fault if her husband has an affair. Of course.

Then the women were stupid enough to marry them. They knew with all that money he has that this is part of the lifestyle.
Don't come crying to me when your real goal was to have an easy life, along with nice clothes and jewelry, cars, etc.

On an individual level, it's a choice. On a collective level, millions of individual choices can easily culminate in a tragedy. One could argue that these women have every right to focus on themselves at the expense of their society's long-term well being, but their society has every right to chastise them for it as well. The West will have to learn the same lesson sooner or later: we need dedicated mothers performing a task that is about as sacred to human nature as anything can be, not H.R. personelle and middle managers.

Seriously, think of how many bright, beautiful children our societies are sacrificing so that their potential mothers can instead sit in a cubicle writing up memos about how bad sexual harassment is, or how to show your work mates proper respect, or why making jokes isn't okay. In what insane world is the latter more valuable in any sense than the former?

The more intelligent and motivated women will not pass their higher quality genes on and the result is a lower quality group on the whole.

The inferior organisms have been multiplying faster than the superior ones for some time now in the west. The mushrooming underclass. The opposite of what evolution predicted.

Evolutionary theory does not predict that smart people are more likely to reproduce. It predicts that whoever functions best in their environment are most likely to reproduce.

The upper class has always been a minority, and the middle class has essentially been taxed out of existence. That leaves us with the lower class, whose standards of living have been steadily increasing due to those tax dollars that have had a significant part in destroying the middle class.

I've worked my entire life post university and haven't had much time for children. I know people who have lived nearly as comfortably as me their entire lives, barely worked a day and popped out a bunch of kids. Our society makes it possible for them to basically have the family I didn't paid for by my hard work.

That's why the lower class is booming and the middle class is disappearing.

On an individual level, it's a choice. On a collective level, millions of individual choices can easily culminate in a tragedy. One could argue that these women have every right to focus on themselves at the expense of their society's long-term well being, but their society has every right to chastise them for it as well. The West will have to learn the same lesson sooner or later: we need dedicated mothers performing a task that is about as sacred to human nature as anything can be, not H.R. personelle and middle managers.

Seriously, think of how many bright, beautiful children our societies are sacrificing so that their potential mothers can instead sit in a cubicle writing up memos about how bad sexual harassment is, or how to show your work mates proper respect, or why making jokes isn't okay. In what insane world is the latter more valuable in any sense than the former?

THis presumes that children benefit from stay at home moms. Sure maybe for the first year, but I would rather my eventual children to have greater social experiences in things like kindergartens than just staying at home with their parents. Also, when the children are in school full time, what benefit does the child get from the mom staying home? The child would probably benefit more from having more money available from the two incomes so they might have a chance to avoid things like school loans. Seriously, is there any proof that a stay at home mom is better for children? Also I've seen several studies that show, past a certain age, peer groups are a bigger influence on children than parents. Lastly, China doesn't need more people, in terms of stability, resource scarcity, and the environment this is a net positive.

Last edited by Leon on Sun Oct 14, 2012 8:06 pm; edited 1 time in total

You actually believe that the American middle class is faltering is because it is excessively taxed? You know, there's no helping the American middle class. You're all John Galt in your own mind.

Underwaterbob wrote:

I've worked my entire life post university and haven't had much time for children. I know people who have lived nearly as comfortably as me their entire lives, barely worked a day and popped out a bunch of kids. Our society makes it possible for them to basically have the family I didn't paid for by my hard work.

If you've never had much time for children, it's because you've never made much time for children. After all, if your claim that someone can "pop out a bunch of kids" and live comfortably is true, nothing stops you from doing the same if children were important to you. But we both know it's not that easy: having children without stable employment can very easily consign a person to poverty, even with some degree of social support, and that's no doubt a part of what has caused you hesitate to commit to it.

Society is totally within its rights -- and behaving totally rationally -- to reallocate assets away from loners like yourself and towards child-bearing couples. Society needs people, and moreover, it needs unintelligent people just as much -- if not more -- than it needs intelligent ones, because it's unintelligent people that do the bulk of the actual hard work. Crops are rotting unpicked in some places in the United States, and it's not for lack of physics professors and lawyers. Whatever cushy middle-class job you envision yourself in, it's going to require a lot of lower-class people working beneath you to necessitate it.

THis presumes that children benefit from stay at home moms. Sure maybe for the first year, but I would rather my eventual children to have greater social experiences in things like kindergartens than just staying at home with their parents.

Well, then you go ahead and send your child to day care from age 1, and make sure it's an urban daycare, so they are exposed to a "multicultural environment" from a nice young age. You can tell us how it all worked out a decade or two from now.

Leon wrote:

Also, when the children are in school full time, what benefit does the child get from the mom staying home?

Do you realize how totally exhausting it is for a woman to work a full day, then come home and still have to do a full day's worth of housework? Surely you can imagine the impact such exhaustion has on the household atmosphere and her ability to fulfill her role as a mother. But look, I know you've fallen for the whole feminist notion that the only way for a woman to live a fulfilling life is to subordinate her familial role to the advancement of her career, so there's not going to be any reconciling this. Live as you've been taught to live. Marry a lawyer, pop out some kids, put them in daycare, and start saving up money not for their college, but for their child support after your lawyer wife divorces you. This is your cultural lifestyle, and I'm not going to dissuade you from embracing it.

THis presumes that children benefit from stay at home moms. Sure maybe for the first year, but I would rather my eventual children to have greater social experiences in things like kindergartens than just staying at home with their parents.

Well, then you go ahead and send your child to day care from age 1, and make sure it's an urban daycare, so they are exposed to a "multicultural environment" from a nice young age. You can tell us how it all worked out a decade or two from now.

Leon wrote:

Also, when the children are in school full time, what benefit does the child get from the mom staying home?

Do you realize how totally exhausting it is for a woman to work a full day, then come home and still have to do a full day's worth of housework? Surely you can imagine the impact such exhaustion has on the household atmosphere and her ability to fulfill her role as a mother. But look, I know you've fallen for the whole feminist notion that the only way for a woman to live a fulfilling life is to subordinate her familial role to the advancement of her career, so there's not going to be any reconciling this. Live as you've been taught to live. Marry a lawyer, pop out some kids, put them in daycare, and start saving up money not for their college, but for their child support after your lawyer wife divorces you. This is your cultural lifestyle, and I'm not going to dissuade you from embracing it.

This presumes that the women is doing all the housework, as opposed to the man and women, and kids, doing so. Obviously daycare options will drastically vary in quality, but if the wife not working is a viable economic option, then a good one shouldn't be far out of reach. I think if a family chooses not to work, and it's economically possible, then that's fine. The way you presume to know where all women's place is, and take away their choice, isn't. Also, most kids are raised by two working parents, are they honestly turning out worse than previous generations. Unless you can quantify any of what you're saying, you're just trying to restrict women's choices.

Also, to your previous point about the world needing more unintelligent people, that is increasingly becoming less and less true. As mechanization increases we will needless and less people to produce more and more. Look at manufacturing, and how the jobs have steadily disappeared. We simply won't need as many people in the future.t

This presumes that the women is doing all the housework, as opposed to the man and women, and kids, doing so.

A statistically accurate assumption, but let's give you your absolute ideal: both the man and the woman are now exhausting themselves after work in a mad scramble to, together, do a day's worth of housework after an 8 to 12 hour long work + commute. And maybe the children get to be badgered into vacuuming or doing the dishes in the process inbetween their own 8 hour school day and their homework time.

Like I said, this is your culture, and I am not trying to dissuade you from enacting it.

Leon wrote:

The way you presume to know where all women's place is, and take away their choice, isn't.

I'm not presuming anything, and I'm not taking away anyone's choice. Like I said, marry your lawyer wife and send your kids to daycare. Have your choices. Wallow in choice.

Leon wrote:

Also, to your previous point about the world needing more unintelligent people, that is increasingly becoming less and less true.

No it isn't. Rather, the illusion of that is being created through massive outsourcing of labor to impoverished countries. Indeed, it's not excessive taxation that is eating away at the middle class, it's the progressive erosion of the bottom of the socio-economic pyramid that is doing it. Knock enough blocks out of the bottom of that pyramid, and you're not going to get a magic, flying pyramid. You're going to get the blocks above falling downwards. Sure, maybe someday your hypothetical robot-society will exist, but it won't mean, "Hey, now all we need is smart people, because robots do all the hard work!" It's going to mean, "Hey, now A.I. can do everything we can, but better, so we don't need human labor or thought at all." That's not even on the horizon right now, though, so perhaps instead of fantasizing about robots, you'd be better off worrying about your fellow man.

This presumes that the women is doing all the housework, as opposed to the man and women, and kids, doing so.

A statistically accurate assumption, but let's give you your absolute ideal: both the man and the woman are now exhausting themselves after work in a mad scramble to, together, do a day's worth of housework after an 8 to 12 hour long work + commute. And maybe the children get to be badgered into vacuuming or doing the dishes in the process inbetween their own 8 hour school day and their homework time.

Like I said, this is your culture, and I am not trying to dissuade you from enacting it.

Leon wrote:

The way you presume to know where all women's place is, and take away their choice, isn't.

I'm not presuming anything, and I'm not taking away anyone's choice. Like I said, marry your lawyer wife and send your kids to daycare. Have your choices. Wallow in choice.

Leon wrote:

Also, to your previous point about the world needing more unintelligent people, that is increasingly becoming less and less true.

No it isn't. Rather, the illusion of that is being created through massive outsourcing of labor to impoverished countries. Indeed, it's not excessive taxation that is eating away at the middle class, it's the progressive erosion of the bottom of the socio-economic pyramid that is doing it. Knock enough blocks out of the bottom of that pyramid, and you're not going to get a magic, flying pyramid. You're going to get the blocks above falling downwards. Sure, maybe someday your hypothetical robot-society will exist, but it won't mean, "Hey, now all we need is smart people, because robots do all the hard work!" It's going to mean, "Hey, now A.I. can do everything we can, but better, so we don't need human labor or thought at all." That's not even on the horizon right now, though, so perhaps instead of fantasizing about robots, you'd be better off worrying about your fellow man.

Would you please give my hypothetical wife a better hypothetical position. I will never marry a lawyer. Also, as someone who works, and does all the housework, as I currently live alone, you must be doing it wrong if you really believe its such an imposing burden that one spouse needs to do it full time.